Preventive Law Enforcement (best of German TV talk shows)

G8's gonna meet in Heiligendamm, which is some remote East German luxury resort. German law enforcement sure learned their lessons and went out to bust some anarchist balls beforehand. Book sales and search engine terms were some of the criteria that could earn you the visit of a friendly neighborhood SWAT team. Secret police also collected smell samples from potential protesters with a potential for violent behaviour in potentially large crowds. Sounds like they hired the consultancy of madman Giuliani and his goons.



They sure could use some public debate consulting though. Currently watching one of the primetime talk-shows, which on German TV mostly means some young bright woman wrangling a stage full of senior citizens with speech impediments. This round's a great one. There's aging punk rocker Campino who spouts dumbed down leftist clichees, duking it out with Bavarian interior minister Beckstein whose verbal skills are just a tad above silverback grunting. There's also some cop and some activist, but my favorite is Heiner Geissler, former general secretary of the conservative party CDU who went all Ramsey Clark on us and recently joined anti-globalist franchise attac. He practices the same kind of robotic reciting of leftwing platform lingo, as Mr. Clark does. Well, at least he's not as grammar challenged as the other guests.



Right on! Now Campino just called the G8 a Kasperlethater (a Punch and Judy show). Followed by another rambling by Beckstein for whom German grammar seems to be as puzzling as a Rubik's Cube. Oh all that anger bottled up by the inability to construct clear thoughts and sentences. If we're really lucky we'll get to see some cardiac arrest on live TV any minute now. It's neck on neck coked up punker against boozed out Bavaro-minister. Outta sight.

Fat Cats and Hogs

I love slow news cycles. Today local tabloid Abendzeitung featured a top story that will go right onto my list of all-time favorite headlines:

PETTING ZOO ANIMALS FED TO LIONS

Waaaaahhh!!! Don't tell the little ones. Well, according to the deputy director of the Nuremberg Zoo "sharing a cadaver is good for the cats' social skills". Sure sounds like a good team building activity for the next middle management seminar.



Another great slow news cycle item was featured in übertabloid Bild, which devoted a whole page to the swimming white tiger in Vallejo, California, which took over the world press from the half-ton hog shot by that Alabama kid with his 50 caliber handgun.

Shutdown

Today Sandalista fave Hugo Chávez closed down opposition channel RCTV, replacing it with a state channel, which started broadcasting twenty minutes after RCTV was pulled off air. First transmission was the national anthem conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old Venezuelan who was appointed as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Sandalistas like Chávez for some good reasons. Using oil money to rebuild villages buried by landslides ain't half that bad. Mostly old school lefties applaud him for taunting Bush. Whenever he's clamping down Caudillo style it seems to be a surprise though. Maybe his cozying up to Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could've been a hint. Or all those members of the Cuban secret police helping the Venezuelans to put in place some serious surveillance apparatus. Not that the CIA backed oil oligarchy opposition is comprised of heros of the working class. But it wasn't exactly the beginning of Chávez campaign against critical media.

Let Them Sing It For You

More from the series "Greatness in Useless Web Applications" (this one works a bit like the fridge magnet poetry sets, just with song snippets. Famous ones - if you can guess all artists in a sentence of five words or more, leave phrase and names in the comments).

Chitlin' Circuit

Munich's own DJ Jonathan Fischer has come out with a new compilation called Motel Lovers.This time he compiled rare and obscure hits from the Chitlin' Circuit. The result makes you feel like spending a Saturday in some joint with a great juke box somewhere in the Mississippi-Tennessee-Alabama area. All great, steaming, nasty, bluesy Funk and Soul that sounds like it's been produced sometime in the 70s, although all tracks are recent. It's JoFi's tenth compilation for Trikont, each one comes highly recommended, like the collection of black Country Dirty Laundry and the study of preaching Funk and Soul Overcome.My favorite is of course Hits & Misses,a whole CD full of songs about and by Muhammad Ali.

Advanced Op-Art

Op-Art for advanced users:

Headacher

73 animated patterns in clashing colors and slightly off kilter forms that do give you a slight headache and/or make you a tad nauseous. Kind of the visual equivalent to noise music (whatever happened to Glenn Branca and Dave Moss?). The bigger the screen the better.

Kraut Boys Can't Jump

Everybody including my editors is going nuts about this band Erdmöbel's No. 1 Hits album full of translated pop covers. How to put this politely now? You'll get it righ away, when you listen to their cover of Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade Of Pale" (above(. It's even more evident, when you compare their version of "Can't get you out of my head" with Kylie Minogue's original (which is pretty shlocky Eurodisco to begin with). Well, if you wanted to prove the Sprockets nature of German pop culture, you sure could play some Erdmöbel in class. Reminded me a bit of those Burmese, who smuggled in pop CDs nobody wanted to hear, because Madonna and Michael Jackson were just too exotic sounding. So they recorded them a bit out of tune with local musiocians and wrote some native lyrics. Since "Papa Don't Preach" didn't really translate culturally, they called the song "The Fish That Got Caught In The Net" and told the story of a rural love affair. The main hit when we travelled Burma was quite a different song though. Went to a Karaoke Bar near the Chinese border, where some opium lords had their girls sing for them and so we were treated to about five versions of "Always Coca Cola".

Alright, enough pop cultural chauvinism. Well deserved as it may be.

Deutschland

The New York Review of Books recently ran a 4,000+ words long review of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar winning fim "The Lives of Others" by Timothy Garton Ash. It's the last paragraph though that's worth the lengthy read. So now, whenever I'm getting into my how-on-earth-could-I-move-to-this-planet-of-joyless-mooks-country, I'm gonna read it to myself:

"The Germany in which this film was produced, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is one of the most free and civilized countries on earth. In this Germany, human rights and civil liberties are today more jealously and effectively protected than (it pains me to say) in traditional homelands of liberty such as Britain and the United States. In this good land, the professionalism of its historians, the investigative skills of its journalists, the seriousness of its parliamentarians, the generosity of its funders, the idealism of its priests and moralists, the creative genius of its writers, and, yes, the brilliance of its filmmakers have all combined to cement in the world's imagination the most indelible association of Germany with evil. Yet without these efforts, Germany would never have become such a good land. In all the annals of human culture, has there ever been a more paradoxical achievement?"

Nouveaux Sapeurs

Things sure seem to have changed on the Sapeurs front, since most of the Congolese dandies were driven into exile during the war. Sure there's still the old school (see above), but if you check out the video by the Sapeurs Premier (love the shoutout to the lead singer's mother, who's a mayor in the Sangha province of Congo Brazzaville in the beginning), you'll definitely see some new definitions of dapper. Hip Hop sure got nothing on them in terms of recent fashion and dance innovations (besides the fact that this been one of the most infectious Soukouss hits I've heard in a while).



There's been some renewed interest in the fashion gangs of Kinshasa and Brazzaville (and Paris and Bruxelles - anybody know, if the Sapeurs made it to the African community in Berlin yet?). There was a story in Colors a while ago, one in Vice and recently another in the LA Times. There's even some semi-scientific paper on the Sapeurs, which ran in the Australian Humanities Review

YouTube has also plenty of underground Sapeurs stuff. A report on Sapeurs from Brazzaville at home and in exile, partially sung by Rapha Bounzéki, in two parts. Uncut videos of young sapeurs showing off their garb in some hotel ballroom and in some parking lot. And of course there's plenty of recent tunes, like the one by Félix Wazekwa , who sure follows in Hip Hop's consumerist steps (just replacing the Gulfstream with a turboprop and the Cristal with some Primus beer) or a recent one by Koffi Olomide , confirming his status as Papa Wemba's true heir as the ultimate style setter. For more Soukouss updates Betrand Kissou's YouTube blog is worth a visist, featuring some recent tunes by the smooth Aurlus Mabele, the hard hitting Extra Musica International, plus some Congolese Hip Hop by BBA and a report on the Brazza scene with the members of Légitime Brigade.

Back

There's always an excuse to fall off the blogroll. Of course even German telecommunication giant Telecom's 20th century service doesn't justify this long a silence (although it did take four weeks to switch over our broadband from one appartment to the other). But now we're home again. Above is the view from our bedroom, below from the kitchen. Place is definitely a good reason to not leave the house. Although Munich on a long weekend like this develops this radically rowdy Daytona Beach vibe, which turns most of the inner city into party central, so if you felt like it, you could spend your whole weekend stumbling through the streets, beer in hand, meeting new friends for life on every other corner. Our best man Don Flan was here for a while (finally somebody who got out obscure references to ancient pop cultures, exotic foods and current affairs again). He sure got his fill of Bavarian culture (see his entry).